Political Order and Political Decay (11 page)

Britain and the United States constitute intermediate cases. Britain began the nineteenth century with an unreformed and patronage-ridden civil service. It cleaned up its bureaucracy beginning in the middle decades of the century, however, laying the foundations for a modern civil service that remains in place to this day. The United States similarly developed a party-led patronage system beginning in the 1820s, in which political appointees dominated the government at federal, state, and local levels. The American phenomenon is more accurately labeled clientelism rather than patronage, since it involved the mass distribution of individual benefits by politicians to supporters in a way that the less open British system did not. Yet the United States also by the second and third decades of the twentieth century succeeded in reforming this system, creating the core of a modern civil service. Britain and the United States were able to eliminate one form of corruption in public administration in a way that Greece and Italy were not.

Key to these different outcomes was the sequence by which different countries reformed their bureaucracies relative to the moment they opened up their political systems to wider democratic contestation. Those countries that created strong bureaucracies while they were still authoritarian, like Prussia, created enduring autonomous institutions that survived subsequent changes of regime into the present. On the other hand, countries that democratized before a strong state was in place, such as the United States, Greece, and Italy, created clientelistic systems that then had to be reformed. The United States succeeded in this; Greece did not; and Italy was only partly successful.

One of the first European countries to acquire a modern state was Prussia, unifier of modern Germany. Prussia began to put together an effective bureaucracy before it industrialized and well before democratic accountability was introduced. I will therefore begin an account of the rise of the modern state with this story.

 

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PRUSSIA BUILDS A STATE

How the Prussian-German bureaucracy became the model for modern bureaucracy; war and military competition as a source of state modernity; the meaning of the Rechtsstaat; why bureaucratic autonomy survived into the present; how war is not the only path to modern bureaucracy

When Max Weber wrote his famous description of modern bureaucracy early in the twentieth century, he was not thinking of the American bureaucracy, which he dismissed as hopelessly corrupt. In terms of the quality of its private sector, America was then the very model of a modern, industrialized nation, but its government was rightly viewed by Europeans as extremely backward. Weber was thinking, rather, of the bureaucracy of his native Germany, which by that time had grown into a disciplined, technically skilled, and autonomous organization that was easily the rival of the famous bureaucracy in neighboring France.

Germany at that moment was only incipiently a democracy; the Bismarck constitution under which the newly unified German state was operating since the 1870s provided for an elected Reichstag, or parliament, but gave extensive powers to an unelected emperor who had control over the military and exclusive right to appoint the chancellor. The main constraint on the executive's power was not democracy, which would not emerge until the formation of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I. Rather, it was the fact that the emperor had to rule through a highly institutionalized bureaucracy that incorporated a well-developed legal system. The resulting Rechtsstaat has been described as a liberal autocracy. It provided strong protections of the rights of its citizens in an impersonal manner, even though these citizens did not have the political right to hold their rulers accountable through elections.

The Rechtsstaat proved to be an excellent platform for economic development because it encompassed strong protection of private property rights and provided for the enforcement of contracts. The German kaiser was spoken of as an “absolute” ruler, but he could not arbitrarily confiscate the holdings of his citizens or personally intervene in their legal proceedings. As a consequence, Germany industrialized with great rapidity in the period from 1871 to 1914 and in many respects overtook Britain as the leading industrial power in Europe.

It took two devastating world wars and the division of the country for the western part of Germany to finally emerge as a consolidated liberal democracy in 1949. But throughout this time and into the period after 1989 when it was reunified, it could depend on a highly competent state administration, reflected in its high rankings in contemporary governance measures. Germany, in other words, developed both a strong state and rule of law early on, well before it developed accountable government. The reason it was able to do so was that the Prussian state that was the precursor of modern Germany engaged in a series of life-and-death military struggles with its neighbors over an extended period of time, just like the Qin state that unified China in 221
B.C.
War, as we saw in Volume 1, creates incentives for efficient, meritocratic government that ordinary economic activity does not and therefore is one important path to state modernity.

Warlordism is probably an appropriate term to describe the state of much of Germany at the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that brought to an end the Thirty Years' War. At that time, the area constituted by modern Germany was fragmented into dozens of small sovereign entities, nominally unified under a transnational structure known as the Holy Roman Empire. What gave this region its warlord character was the fact that very few of these entities were strong enough to tax their own territories through a regular bureaucracy, raise a professional army, or create a monopoly of force that could reliably enforce their laws. Instead, the dynastic rulers of these polities tended to hire armed mercenaries and pay them with borrowed money; when resources ran out, these armed groups simply lived off the land by looting and pillaging. When these armies were not requisitioning food from hapless peasants, they were destroying crops and infrastructure to prevent their use by rivals. The ensuing famine and disease reduced the urban population of Germany by one-third and the rural population by two-fifths in the course of the Thirty Years' War.
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AN ARMY WITH A COUNTRY

When the young Frederick William of the house of Hohenzollern became the Elector of Brandenberg in December 1640, it was not at all obvious that his patrimony would serve as the core of a great nation, as opposed to larger rival states such as Saxony or Bavaria. Like many dynastic polities in this period, his domains were not contiguous, extending from east Prussia (now parts of Poland and Russia) all the way to Mark and Cleves in western Germany. The bureaucracy he inherited remained thoroughly patrimonial.
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In each of his territories he had to share power with the estates, the feudal institution representing the landed nobility who were effectively sovereign on their own lands and needed to be consulted in matters of war and taxation. It had only been in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the progenitors of this aristocracy had shifted from what economist Mancur Olson labeled “roving bandits” who gained resources largely through pillaging and feuding to “stationary bandits” who earned their keep by taxing a servile agrarian population for whom they provided a minimum of public goods like physical security and justice in return.
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These stationary bandits would come to be known as the Junkers.

As chronicled in Volume 1, accountable government first emerged in England at the end of the seventeenth century because the English estates, organized as a cohesive parliament, had the power to block the king's initiatives and indeed were able to depose two kings in the course of the century. In Brandenberg-Prussia, the opposite happened: the estates were weak and divided, and a series of resourceful and strong-minded rulers—the Great Elector Frederick William (1640–1688), King Frederick William I of Prussia (1713–1740), and Frederick II (Frederick the Great, 1740–1786)—succeeded in progressively stripping them of political power and concentrating it in the hands of a centralized royal administration.

The instrument by which this centralization occurred was the army. Very few rulers in this period maintained standing armies in periods of peace. The Great Elector established one by refusing to disband his army after the Peace of Oliva that ended the Swedish-Polish War in 1660 in which Prussia had participated. Having come of age at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War, Frederick William recognized that Prussia's survival as a largely landlocked state surrounded by powerful rivals could be guaranteed only through military power.
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Through a variety of stratagems, he took over the fiscal powers of the estates, disbanded independent militias, and centralized financial and military authority under a bureaucracy he controlled. This process continued under the Great Elector's grandson Frederick William I of Prussia, whom historian Hajo Holborn characterized as “a boorish man, lacking not only in cultural graces but also in sensitivity for the human feelings of his fellow men … a formidable tyrant over his family, entourage, and state.”
5
Frederick William was, however, a skilled state builder, who replaced the pleasure garden in front of his palace with a military drill ground and turned its ground floor into government offices. He created, in the words of historian Hans Rosenberg, “a first-rate army which had to be supported by a country which was third-rate in terms of manpower, natural wealth, capital supply, and economic skills.”
6

There was, in addition, a critical cultural dimension to Prussian state building. The Hohenzollern family had become Calvinist in the mid-sixteenth century, which put them at odds with the largely Lutheran nobility. Their Calvinism had at least three important consequences. First, the Great Elector and his successors staffed the new central bureaucracy with imported Dutch and Huguenot coreligionists, which increased the bureaucracy's autonomy from the surrounding society. Second, Puritan moralism infused the behavior of individual leaders, particularly Frederick William I, whose thrift, personal austerity, and intolerance of corruption were legendary. And finally, the introduction of Calvinism in the Prussian lands created a whole series of new social institutions, from schools to parishes registering local populations to poor-relief houses, which were eventually taken over by and assimilated into a new, more modern state. This created competitive pressures for similar reforms among Lutherans and Catholics, not just in Prussia but also throughout Europe.
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Just as in Warring States China, creation of a substantial army was a matter not of princely caprice but of national survival, something the Hohenzollern rulers recognized more clearly than their continental rivals.
8
Indeed, Prussia itself almost disappeared during the Seven Years' War, when Frederick the Great was almost captured and killed while fighting a much larger Russia and Austria simultaneously. It was only Frederick's enormous skill as a military commander and outright luck (the accession of Peter III to the Russian throne) that saved the state and allowed it to remain a major European player. This is what led to the description of Prussia not as a country with an army but rather “an army with a country.”
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The shift from a patrimonial to a modern bureaucracy in Prussia took place only in stages between 1640 and the conclusion of the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in the early nineteenth century. The Great Elector began the process in the second half of the seventeenth century with the separation of the civil and military bureaucracies, and the organization of the former into a series of technical
Regierungen
or councils. The need to raise resources made the war commissariat the primary instrument of centralization; its ability to administer an increasingly complex taxation system and its function as a military supply administration drove its evolution into the nation's chief economic policy body.
10

By the late eighteenth century, the Prussian bureaucracy was a curious mixture of meritocratic and patrimonial recruitment and promotion: despite the fact that Frederick the Great promoted talented officers and bureaucrats, he often favored loyalty over competence. Once Frederick's wars came to an end, so did the pressure for advancement by merit. Prominent families developed near monopolies over certain service branches, and commissions and promotions could be had in return for loans and bribes. Prussia, in other words, underwent a process of repatrimonialization, just as China did at the end of the later Han Dynasty.
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HISTORY ENDS IN PRUSSIA

According to the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, history as such ended at the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt in 1806, when the half-patrimonial Prussian army was annihilated by Napoleon Bonaparte at the head of a much more modern military machine based on the
levée en masse
and organized according to modern bureaucratic principles. The young philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who witnessed Napoleon riding through the university town of Jena, saw in that defeat the triumph of the modern state. He argued in
The Phenomenology of Spirit
that this type of state modernity represented the culmination of a long historical process of human reason making itself manifest. Kojève, interpreting Hegel in the 1930s, suggested that the idea of the modern state, once unleashed in the world, would eventually universalize itself because it was so powerful: those facing it would either conform to its dictates or be swallowed up.
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The groundwork for a modern state had already begun in the years before the Battle of Jena, with the 1770 civil service reform that introduced examinations as the basis for promotion. But the old system could not overcome its inertia without the disaster of military defeat. The post-Napoleonic reform was led by Baron Karl vom und zum Stein (1757–1831), an aristocrat descended from a family of Imperial Knights, who nonetheless studied at Göttingen and in England and was a follower of the liberal philosopher Montesquieu,
13
and Prince Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822), whose motto after Jena became “democratic principles in a monarchical government.”
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